There exists in eduspeak the theory that, no matter what the mix is in ones classroom, each child/pre teen/teen can be taught as if they are alone in the classroom. That is, one teacher can simply “differentiate” instruction so that, in a class of 20 or so students, each student is receiving instruction for exactly where they are on the learning curve. This writer, over the last 35 years of teaching, has not been able to do any such thing.

The people who make these all inclusive statements about how education can be delivered in the classroom seem to lack one important ingredient: they are not classroom teachers of young children, or, if they were, it was an awfully long time ago. Most University and Community College instructors, in the direct experience of this writer, haven’t the requisite experience in the classroom to know how far off base this all in one classroom actually is. There are, as always, some exceptions to this. John Shefelbineis an exception.

I am pretty sure that the time it takes to teach a concept (a letter sound, digraph, blend etc) to a bright, well fed, enthusiastic child is quite different from the time it takes to teach the same concept to a child who has entered my classroom damaged by life, or who is significantly younger than his peers.

The disruptions caused by children in any classroom, who are unable, for a variety of reasons, to stay on task, take up quite a bit of teaching time, turning it into non-teaching time. Because of the NCLB requirements, children who are under performing will get the bulk of a teachers time. Children who are disruptive to the teaching time in the classroom severely interfere with not only the time that under performing students need and deserve, they interfere with the possibilities for the children who are more than capable of meeting and exceeding whatever the state/federal requirements are.

It is time to restructure, as Arne Duncan likes to say, the way the classroom is run. It is time to allow the very capable students to be in classes that will allow them to accelerate, while the children who are working very hard at basic understanding get the teaching time they need as well. Somewhere in all of the deep thinking, by whoever “they” are who do the deep thinking, but not the classroom teaching, there should be a program developed for the disruptive, at least for a majority of the teaching day, in a classroom of their own. Tracking, you say? Absolutely. Let’s get back to it. Let’s hire enough teachers to separate the learning levels, for a majority of the teaching day, into their own rooms, so that they may, finally, learn at the pace they are capable of. It is patently unfair to inflict disruptive classroom behavior on students who are paying attention, in the name of “mainstreaming” or “full immersion”. While that sort of theory may feel very good to the adults who put it forth, and who aren’t classroom teachers, it simply doesn’t work well in the real world of the everyday classroom.

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The separation of students based on behaviour and ability has some merit, however, it also serves to label students. A student placed in a low achievement or disruptive group is highly aware of where they fit in and are likely to continue to carry on in these behaviours. They are unlikely to be able to move into the other groups.

It raises issues too of who will teach these challenging students. I doubt that any teacher will be able to stand, day after day, an unrewarding and difficult class day after day.

Certainly the issues that you describe above are real, but I feel that there must be some other solution that does not serve to limit the achievement of those who are already at risk of failure.